Wellness Calendar: Sunday 7 December

The seventh revolution
[Living with uncertainties; blind-spots; “I don’t know”; known unknowns; Johari window; Kloppisms]
What do you make of the below ideas?
Life carries no guarantees. Delicious as it sounds, no one has the superhuman power to look into the future and say for sure what’s going to happen. Yes, some things are more likely to happen than others, but generally there are no givens and anyone who gambles does so at their own risk, their own disappointment.
If we hold and contain the concept that life brings with it no certainties, perhaps it frees us up to becoming less dependent on those who promise the earth, who claim to know the answers, and who give us the illusion of certainty.
If we can disengage with power-mongers who’ll say anything to hold sway, if we switch off when advertisers use wildly impossible persuasions, if we avoid gurus and messiahs, celebrities and influencers who seem to know what’s best for us even though they do not know us – then might we end up with a more healthy, independent and reality-based world? Would it be a useful task to work out what you fall prey to when it comes to the tempting falsehoods of the outside world?
Instead, can we quietly get on with the business of increasing our knowing through finding out things that resonate with our own experiences and our own existing understandings? As well as being open to ideas that challenge us?
A blind spot in physical terms refers to a part of our eye that cannot see. A blind spot in psychological terms refers to a reality that we cannot see (or refuse to see). There are a number of reasons why this may be. One of the biggest causes of blind spots comes when our own values and beliefs cloud our thinking and our judgements. Another reason is the fear of what we might see, coupled with the perceived threat to our very being if we find out that things aren’t quite how we thought they were.
Just like a roulette wheel, we all have a bias towards certain areas; sometimes this is fine and at other times it can cause problems in our lives. One interesting aspect of blind spots is that we are good at spotting other people’s apparent blindness to reality, but less so for our own selves. Yet there is every chance that through investing more time in yourself, you will overcome these blind spots and get to a place where you are not threatened by what’s really going on in your world and the world around you – where you can see across a 360-degree landscape.
If you ever find yourself saying “I don’t know” either aloud or internally, which “I don’t know” are you referring to? Is it the “I don’t know and I don’t want to know” type, or the “I don’t know but I’m interested enough to stay with it” variety? The reason this might be useful is that if you’re up for discoveries then you’ve already found one: you know that you don’t know (whatever it is that you don’t know). And just like a person who’s made a start on a jigsaw with a corner, you now have an edge to work on. And who’s not to say that if you stay with this ‘known unknown’ (as Donald Rumsfeld might say), you’ll get the missing pieces eventually by building around the incomplete area?
Johari window is a great way to visualise which areas to focus on in order to improve our self-awareness. Within four different windows there are four different versions of yourself, each with varying degrees of self-knowledge and shared knowledge.
The public self-window includes all the things about you that you know about and are okay to share with others. The private self holds all the things about you that you know about and that you choose not to share with others. The hidden self includes all the things about you that you do not know about but that others do know. The unknown self is the window we’re encouraged to spend time on, as this is all the things about you that you do not know about and that no one else knows about either.
A Kloppism – named after the football manager Jurgen Klopp – is a statement that is believed to be true (or as near to a truth as you’re ever likely to get). It’s a statement that doesn’t need to be debated, researched or evidence-based because it’s strongly seen to be correct. It’s also a statement that doesn’t tend to be spoken because it’s so obvious and taken for granted. During Klopp’s early interviews with English journalists, he often repeated the following phrases: “We know this,” and, “This is how it is.”
For us to say “we know this” about any subject could be a valuable pin in the mapping of ourselves and our world. We’re saying this is what we know. And, in turn, we’re also saying this is what we don’t know – i.e., everything that’s left out of what we know. There are things that we know, things that we don’t know, and there are also things in the middle that we might know or we might not know, depending on how much more information we get or don’t get.
Knowing what is and what isn’t, knowing how things are and how they are not, as well as not knowing either way, gives us a boundary, a frame to our understanding. Being able to define where gaps of knowledge are in our lives can be of great help to us. And while it’s unlikely that we’ll ever be able to get all the pieces of a picture together with any certainty, striving for greater clarity is very much a part of the essence of our wellness. Hence its inclusion in our revolutions.